Manufacturing based companies have enormous investments in assets that are part of the operational processes that drive their business. Optimizing the use of those assets is critical to a company's operational effectiveness and therefore its bottom line.
The equipment or assets that run the manufacturing or production processes are generally connected to servers or controllers to generate operational data that can be used to monitor the manufacturing or production process. Typically, companies will collect the operational data and perform operational analysis to provide immediate performance characteristics that can often be represented in dashboards, score sheets, or reports. Information models can be used to represent how assets are deployed and the relationships between assets such as connections, associations or containment. Armed with both the model information and the “real time” operational data organizations can perform current or future condition analysis on assets and asset groups.
Similarly, organizations may use event models to understand relationships between events within their physical infrastructure. These event models may be explicitly defined, or they could be implicit in the deployment of business operational processes. These processes could be programmatic, rule based, or supplied by a knowledge expert. But independent of how they are manifested, they represent relationships between events that occur within the operational process. For example, the event model would be able to tell a customer what response needs to occur if a critical piece of equipment is operating over a specific threshold, for example running too hot or consuming too much power.